Bomb blasts in the Syrian cities of Homs and Damascus have left at least 140 people dead, monitors and state media say.

At least four blasts struck the southern Damascus suburb of Sayyida Zeinab, killing at least 83 people, state media said.

Earlier in Homs, 57 people, mainly civilians, were killed in a double car bombing, a monitoring group reported.

So-called Islamic State (IS) said it carried out the attacks in both cities.

Meanwhile, US Secretary of State John Kerry has said a "provisional agreement" has been reached with Russia on a partial truce in the conflict...

The Damascus bombing was in the Sayyida Zainab district, home of the shrine to Sayyida (Lady) Zainab, daughter of 'Ali زينب بنت علي
and it is this 'Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, whom the Shi'a consider to be the correct successor to the caliphate and not Mu'awiyah and then Mu'awiyah's son, Yazid, whose troops killed Hussein - the son of 'Ali - at Karbala.

{ http://www.ezsoftech.com/stories/sayyida.zainab.aspBirthday of Sayyida Zainab (sa) is observed as Nurse's Day in Iran... A nurse's occupation is not an ordinary one. Nursing is a sacred and valuable profession. A nurse does not work for money or material benefits, for the wages she receives do not compensate of her untainted labors. When a nurse sees that her patient's life is in danger, she forgets everything and becomes selfless. Birthday of Sayyida Zainab (sa) is observed as Nurse's Day in Iran.At the height of the Islamic month of Muharram, in the year 61, after Hijrah, on the night of Ashura, when the devilish enemy set the Ahlul Bayt's (as) tent on fire and drove the children to the desert in the night, Sayyida Zainab (sa) tended women and children in a half-burnt tent, shared in their sorrow with patience and endurance, and nursed the feverish patient of Karbala, Imam Sajjad (as)...She is a model of resistance and sacrifice.....with special characteristics gathered within her, it is as if she were the protector of moral values, law abidance, the protector and executor of our higher duties, sympathetic, kind, conscientious, independent, shouldering responsibility, hard-working and untiring.Sayyida Zainab (sa) was not only a nurse for women and children. She nursed those who had suffered in body and soul, those whose clothing and skin had burned in the frightening tent fire at dusk on Ashura, those who had suffered mentally, those who had heard rejoicing in their miseries. This nursing began at dusk on the day of Ashura and continued to Kufah, Karbala and Medina...}

Islamic State bombers have killed more than 60 people near Syria’s holiest Shia shrine in Damascus as the country’s main opposition group met the UN mediator, Staffan de Mistura, for the first time.

Representatives of the Saudi-backed Higher Negotiation Committee (HNC) – which includes political and militant opponents of President Bashar al-Assad – warned they may yet walk away from the Geneva talks unless the suffering of civilians in the five-year conflict was eased.

The head of the Syrian government delegation said that the blasts in Damascus, which the interior ministry blamed on a car bomb and two suicide bombers, merely confirmed the opposition’s terrorist links – even though Isis has been excluded from the talks...

The birth date of Lady Zainab, a day when Shi'a may come to the shrine in Damascus to pay their respects, fell on February 14, 2016, a date almost directly between the two attacks. It was as if ISIS - or some ISIS surrogate - sought to maximize the damage and had some deadly glitches, jumping the gun in January and being a week late in February, thus bookending the birth date of Lady Zainab with a bloody rain of mortal remains... invoking a memory of Karbala.